Bethany G. Anderson, Mary Borgo Ton, and Kristen Allen Wilson

Navigating Social Networks at the Margins: Women in Science Archives, Then and Now

“No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science,” draws on feminist approaches and text-mining technologies to surface stories about women in the domestic science movement at the University of Illinois. This article describes approaches used to digitize the domestic science collection in its conceptualization and initial stages. The project was originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in August 2024; the grant’s cancellation in April 2025 foregrounds the role of social networks to support archival work in moments of disruption in ways that parallel the strategies adopted by the women represented by the materials digitized.

Introduction

The social history movement of the 1960s prompted a critical awakening in the archival community, drawing attention to the absence of documentation about women’s lives. When Eva Moseley wrote “Women in Archives: Documenting the History of Women in America” in the 1973 special issue of American Archivist, women’s history remained an emergent and marginalized field.¹ Apart from the establishment of women’s repositories, such as the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, women’s personal papers constituted a small fraction of materials in many repositories across the United States. Moseley’s article discussed the benefits and limitations of having “women’s only” archives, but she saw these institutions as important first steps towards integrating women into mainstream archival representation.

Moseley’s article and the 1973 issue of American Archivist became a catalyst for conversations about collection development and diversification of the historical record. A few years later, the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Women’s History Sources Survey at the University of Minnesota published Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States.² The survey not only heightened awareness about existing women’s archives but it also encouraged archivists to reassess their holdings and collect women’s papers.³ The growing interest in developing and foregrounding women’s archives also extended beyond archival repositories. For example, the women’s studies journal Signs had an “Archives” section, reflecting a broader interdisciplinary commitment to preserving and interpreting women’s historical experiences.⁴

Despite these early efforts, and later emphases on the importance of documenting women’s experiences through intersectional lenses, women remain underrepresented in archives.⁵ This disparity is particularly pronounced for women scientists, who face a dual invisibility in both science and scientific archives. While women have always been part of science, they were pushed to the margins—or excluded altogether—from scientific institutions and teams. Indeed, “[w]omen have long been ‘in science,’ but not central to science.”⁶ Nonetheless, women always found a way to engage in the scientific enterprise. Archives, likewise, demonstrate that women have always been part of science; if one looks close enough, they are there. But to say that finding women scientists in the archives is only a matter of looking belies the complexities of archival research and of archives themselves, the societies they document, and the very real and entrenched biases which they evidence, all of which must be disentangled by archivists and archival researchers in finding women scientists in the archives.

Barriers for women in science are not a thing of the past. Women continue facing harassment, discrimination, biases, and marginalization in scientific fields, despite some progress in gender parity. Preserving and making available the archives of women scientists for present and future generations is especially critical; when women do not see themselves reflected in archives, they may conclude that their materials do not belong in repositories, which perpetuates archival silences. Archives are also not neutral spaces, creating and perpetuating their own biases through acquisitions, metadata creation, digitization, and other decisions that may impede access or create and widen gaps. These biases and gaps may not only go unquestioned but may also become further compounded when researchers bring their own biases and stereotypes, unconscious or not, to the archival materials they use to piece together histories about science. Archives can—and often do—perpetuate such inequities; however, they also have the power to help assuage and contest them.

Taking the latter as a point of departure, the authors created a digital project that seeks to counter misconceptions about women in the history of science and amplify their important contributions and ideas through greater digital access to their archives. Originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in August 2024, and subsequently terminated in April 2025, “No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science” draws on feminist approaches and text-mining technologies to surface stories about women in the domestic science movement at the University of Illinois and University of Minnesota. As an academic field established in the early twentieth century focused on education and training to manage the home and to promote healthy lifestyles, domestic science is a critical field in which to understand women’s contributions to science. While women were often pushed to the margins of scientific fields and knowledge production, domestic science and the home itself could be areas where women “participated in science on their own terms.”⁷ Domestic science was also an important space for science education, particularly at land-grant institutions.⁸ By digitizing materials on the domestic science movement, and using technologies to provide information about the women faculty, staff, and students, this project aims to highlight women scientists, science education for women, and the ways they contributed to scientific knowledge. Beyond these aims, this project is also a means to use feminist and digital affordances to unearth the networks in which women exchanged, debated, and developed scientific knowledge. This article demonstrates that documenting and revealing such networks—especially the ways they function as networks of support for marginalized individuals navigating professional precarity—is an evergreen need, as well as one that is also relevant to the authors themselves.

Women in Domestic Science Archives

The University of Illinois Archives’ holdings include several records series related to the academic program in domestic science.⁹ While there is a rich history of several prominent figures in the field of household science in the University of Illinois Archives, gaps in content persist in what has been preserved, as well as who is represented. Data and information about experiments that led to publications and manuscripts are often missing from the archives. The publications guide women in the best practices for cooking, cleaning, child rearing, etc., but were not written for other academic audiences to replicate the experiments and science. Context about how the ideas that inform these publications were developed can be difficult to locate. There is also context missing from some of the course materials and assignments. These gaps in information often make it challenging to know what was being taught with these items. Another limitation is whose materials are preserved or not. Most of the materials related to the household science/home economics department are from prominent figures in the field, both nationally and at the university level. There is a good deal of administrative and lesson plan information, but less information exists about the students and workshop participants and their experiences. White women are also predominantly represented as creators in these materials.

Eleven cubic feet of materials were selected for this pilot project. Records chosen for digitization encompass the Household Science Department Letterbooks,¹⁰ Home Economics Education Source Materials,¹¹ Home Economics Alumni Association,¹² and correspondence related to the department.¹³ Digitized materials also include papers from faculty members of the department, including one of the leading figures in domestic science, Isabel Bevier.¹⁴ Other faculty members’ papers that are a part of this project include Lita Bane,¹⁵ Nellie Perkins,¹⁶ Marjorie Virginia Guthrie,¹⁷ and Janice Smith.¹⁸

The dates of these materials range from 1879 to the 1990s, with most of the materials created in the early 1900s. The School of Domestic Science and Art at the University of Illinois was established in 1872 but disbanded in 1881. After alumnae advocated for a new program, it returned as the Department of Household Science under the leadership of Isabel Bevier in 1900. In 1974, the department became the School of Human Resources and Family Studies.¹⁹ Thus most of the materials are from the first half of the twentieth century and document these transitions and the evolution of the program.

These records represent an array of material types: correspondence, scrapbooks, class projects, published papers and books, newspaper articles, job offers, histories about people and the department, reports, photographs, slides, diagrams, and floor plans. Due to their origin in the domestic science program, the physical material used to create these materials is equally diverse. The letterbooks are bound letters on onionskin paper. There are fabric samples that were used to demonstrate different materials, or designs or stitches. Some class assignments had movable paper pieces to demonstrate furniture. By including various materials and formats, this project seeks to identify a diverse array of scientific activities, pedagogical practices, and curricula. At the same time, material, such as those pertaining to alumnae, were chosen to illuminate lesser-known individuals and their contributions.

Designing Feminist Digitization Practices

To create a project that both acknowledges these limitations while also recovering the perspectives of the women who are represented in archival material, the project team turned to interstitial feminist project design. Taking inspiration from scholars like Wadewitz, and Losh and Wernimont, “No Longer at the Margins” challenges hierarchical relationships and exploitative partnerships by prioritizing a lateral leadership model.²⁰ Bringing together multiple digitization sites and stakeholder groups also required flexibility about digital storage and curation; rather than create one site to serve as a hegemonic representation of the collection, the project brought together multiple sites of preservation and access, including institutional digital collections, non-profit linked data, and code-sharing platforms. The project also took women’s bodies into account, in project deliverables, as the team needed flexibility in the digitization timeline to account for two co-principal investigators’ maternity leaves—leaves that had not been planned for in the original timeline.²¹ This flexibility also made it possible for the principal investigators to pursue professional development, including a PhD in history and an MS in Library and Information Science.

Planning was several years in the making. In 2022, the authors applied for and received an internal grant from the University of Illinois’ Campus Research Board. “Democratizing Science for Women: A Digital Domestic Science Project²²” entailed a literature review and survey, and conducted interviews with researchers, archivists, faculty members, and historians of women in science to learn more about their use of archival materials and how digital scholarship tools would be useful for their research. This research laid the foundation for a grant proposal to the NEH’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) program, submitted in July 2023. The research findings from the Campus Board-funded project revealed that scholars employ a variety of strategies to find archival materials for women scientists. These include learning how to search and interpret results in different databases and content management systems; talking to colleagues and archivists to find out more about materials, and whether any exist for an individual; and reading citations of published papers to learn what archival sources others have found.²³

Funding for travel to repositories and the cost of digital surrogates are major barriers for access, which was made more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Having access to a centralized resource with freely available digitized materials would be incredibly useful for these reasons alone. While many researchers interviewed did not have experience using digital humanities/digital scholarship tools and methods, or used archivally generated data for computational uses, many expressed an interest in learning more about what these tools and methods could offer. Researchers expressed that any tools that could enable them to track down more names of women scientists in materials, learn more about who was corresponding with whom, or who was mentioning another woman scientist, would be extremely valuable. These insights inform the methods employed in the current grant project.

As part of the Campus Board project, the authors also conducted a survey of repositories holding domestic science materials. This survey provided the foundation for contacting institutions in the United States that held papers from important figures and programs in domestic science, including HBCUs, and public and private universities, to amplify the stories of women scientists who are not as well-known. Some repositories expressed interest but were unable to commit staff during the grant period; others did not respond. Ultimately the project team relied on its own networks, connecting with a previous collaborator at the University of Minnesota (UMN). UMN holds some materials that resonated with the materials identified for digitization. At the same time, the partnership with UMN has enabled us to explore the ways land-grant institutions were foundational in the complex history of domestic science.

This partnership parallels the aims of this project: finding networks and collaborations between women scientists to better understand how the field of domestic science developed. Today, email communications arrive more quickly than mailed letters, but there are similarities in waiting for responses and ultimate reliance on personal connections to help the project achieve its goals. Finding participants for the advisory board was easier as it was a smaller time commitment. Modern technology allows for more voices and facilitates international connections to help shape this project, whereas domestic scientists in the past often had to wait—for annual conferences or between letters—for the kinds of conversations the team can now hold every few months over Zoom with the advisory board.

As mentioned, the collaboration with UMN made it possible to look more closely at land-grant institutions and how their domestic science programs developed. Amy Sue Bix notes that,

many in American society considered it inappropriate or odd for women to pursue science seriously. But at land-grant colleges, female faculty developed pioneering ‘domestic science’ programs, where ideals of intelligent femininity justified teaching women chemistry, as well as physics, nutrition and household-technology.²⁴

Land-grant institutions seek to educate the whole state, not just their students. Domestic science programs were especially important as they reached out to women and helped educate them on scientific principles that could help in what society viewed as a woman’s role to take care of the home and family. There are many examples of domestic science programs reaching out to communities and bringing women to the university for a few days for workshops. This outreach is documented in materials related to the Home Economics Demonstration Rail Cars, which were train cars that traveled to rural communities to teach more about home management, food and nutrition, preparation and other topics.²⁵ This project, along with many other University of Illinois Extension Programs, fostered the sharing of scientific knowledge across the state.²⁶

Partnerships are critical to this grant project, and to the amplification of women scientists’ archives. In addition to collaborating with UMN Archives to digitize materials related to domestic science, this project aims to create multiple access points to amplify materials and stories of women scientists across multiple platforms. One of the deliverables of this project will be the creation of a website that provides access to digitized materials and machine-generated data from them. The project team envisions this website as but one in which these materials will be discoverable in the long-term. A part of this grant project will also include developing resources that can eventually be shared between several allied projects that promote history of science and women in science, namely, the Science Stories Research Collaborative²⁷ and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM).²⁸ The CHSTM supports scholarship and engagement with archival materials through a wide variety of programs and resources, and—though it is not focused on the history of women specifically—it does include a working group on women, gender, and sexuality.

As two of the project goals are to develop resources that can be shared and used by other institutions, and to amplify women scientists and their papers, the project team sought to centralize these resources and to develop a project website that integrates and cross-links to content. Science Stories was contracted as a vendor. Working with Science Stories centralizes data, resources, and stories about women scientists in one place where other projects can use and incorporate content generated as needed. Much of the data will be included in Wikimedia Commons, Wikibase, and Wikidata, where it can be used and incorporated into other linked data platforms and wiki projects, thus amplifying discovery.

The project team also developed an interdisciplinary advisory board comprising archivists, librarians, and historians of science. The advisory board advises and provides feedback on project plans and preliminary deliverables. Through convening advisory board meetings, discussions focused on creating access; how they have—or might—use “archives-as-data;” and how the data and stories might be leveraged. Each board meeting entails reviewing project goals and emphasizes the importance of providing multiple ways of participation and the centering of a feminist ethos of care to our collaboration.²⁹ Members of the board have also expressed interest in adding to the Wikidata and in more actively participating in the project. Engaging our board and finding ways they can meaningfully participate underscores the importance of collaboration to the project goals.

Networks with the Machine Learning and Linked Open Data

To trace social networks in the archival materials at scale, the project aims to enhance digital records through machine learning and AI-augmented techniques. The limited scope of our project enables the team to assess the accuracy of these techniques through human-centered review. Potential benefits and challenges of this approach are exemplified by a typed letter to Mrs. S. Noble King, co-founder of the McLean County chapter of the Illinois Association of Domestic Science, from Isabel Bevier, then head of the Household Science Department at the University of Illinois.³⁰ A copy of this correspondence, on onionskin, has been preserved in the departmental letter books (see figure 1).

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a well-established method that uses machine learning to identify the shapes of characters in an image of a document and render them as machine-readable text. Because the letterforms in typed material are more consistent, it is easier to apply this technique to print materials. However, due to the onionskin’s thinness and the fading type, there is not enough optical information for OCR to correctly guess what characters are represented on that part of the page. Large Language Models (LLMs) might offer a way to fill in these gaps. LLMs are mathematical representations of patterns in human-authored text across millions of documents. When used as part of the OCR process, LLMs apply what they know about patterns more generally to make more accurate guesses about what the text might say. In addition, some models are multimodal in that they have been trained on textual and visual material, making them much better at recognizing hand-written material than previous tools. However, LLMs have been trained largely on material from the internet, namely the Common Crawl.³¹ Our project would test to what extent this thoroughly contemporary training set would affect different LLMs’ abilities to correctly identify the words on the page.

After processing the texts through OCR, the project uses named-entity recognition (NER), a well-established form of linguistic analysis, to create lists of people, places, and institutions mentioned in the materials.³² The letter above includes references to multiple local and statewide stakeholders, including Dean of Agriculture Eugene Davenport, Domestic Science Instructor Miss Van Meter, and President L. C. Lord of the Eastern Illinois State Normal School in Charleston. This method could also be used to identify organizations (e.g., “Chicago Women’s Club”), but it might miss more oblique references to named entities because they are not, grammatically, proper nouns, as is the case with “the department” serving as shorthand for the University of Illinois’ Household Science Department.

If the quality of the OCR was high enough, NER could extract these names; however, this method does not provide any information about their relationship to Bevier and Noble King, other than that Bevier name-dropped them in her correspondence. Still, the density of names could help identify the correspondence that has the highest levels of social networking, ultimately pointing to the political stakes of these letters. In this case, Bevier addresses a socially awkward situation: she received two invitations to speak but was unable to attend both events. Her solution was to suggest alternate speakers to deliver presentations on “bread work” or “How to Judge Cloth” at Mrs. Noble King’s event in Olney, Illinois, while Bevier would present at the Chicago Women’s Club. Bevier portrays her response as a strategic one for the domestic science program: “It has seemed to me best for professional reasons to go to the state meeting . . . I am anxious to have the department represented always, but I hardly see the way to be there myself this year.”³³

Linked Open Data addresses the gap between identifying references to people and interpreting their meaning by connecting names to biographical data through crowdsourced knowledge. Partnering with Science Stories would allow the project to tap into Wikidata to gather more information about the people, places, and organizations represented in our records and to enhance these materials through community-oriented edit-a-thons. Sharing this data openly not only increases the amount of publicly available information about women in science, but it also empowers other projects to reuse the data to better understand the role of women in their own collections. As an extension of open-access information, the text-mining version of the materials, plus all our Python code, will be made available as a code recipe book, which the team hopes will be used in undergraduate and graduate classrooms to teach digital humanities analytical techniques.

Addressing the Federal Situation

Between September 2024 and April 2025, the project established networks for collaboration across institutions, non-profit organizations, and international partners through advisory board meetings and stakeholder conversations. The University of Illinois completed approximately ninety percent of the planned digitization work, which resulted in the training of a graduate student assistant, creating metadata templates, and preparing files for ingest into our digital repository. UMN digitized the Inez Hobart Papers, which would help us pilot collaborative workflows for sharing digitized materials. The project team also laid the foundations for text-mining education and contributions to AI innovation by making progress on linked open data templates with Science Stories, and by hiring a graduate student to support text mining. A member of the project’s advisory board, Serenity Sutherland, worked to develop a human-authored list of key words and tags that would serve as a gold standard for future tests of AI-generated summaries. The team continued to carry out the work as planned, despite increasingly distressing news about dismantling the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services by the United States DOGE Service,³⁴ acting on behalf of President Donald Trump without formalized congressional support, in January 2025.

Like so many projects funded by the NEH, the grant-funded work was cut short as of April 2025. In a message to the University of Illinois’s Sponsored Program Administration (SPA) from an @nehemail.onmicrosoft.com account, sent on April Fools’ Day, the email notified the team that the grant was terminated, effective the following day, April 2, 2025. The letter stated that the project was no longer funded because “the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”³⁵ Working with the University of Illinois’s SPA, the project team confirmed, through eGMS Reach, that the grant was, in fact, terminated, and that the team could appeal this decision, following protocols described in the letter.³⁶

Though left vague in the initial letter, a NEH press release indicated that the agency was taking steps to not fund projects that “promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.”³⁷ According to multiple news sources, this review process included screening grant narratives using keywords like “feminism,” “women,” and “marginalized,” all of which were terms used in our project title—and the grant proposal narrative—to emphasize how women had been underrepresented in the history of science.³⁸ The project ethos is not to advance a particular gender ideology, but to use feminism as a framework for more equitable collaborative practice. The irony is that domestic science materials provide the kinds of interesting challenges that data scientists and computer engineers need to drive American innovation in AI, a stated key strategic priority for the Trump administration.³⁹ With NEH funding, the project would have created a reusable dataset to train the next generation of data analysts and computer scientists. The project would have also developed language-processing techniques that can be applied more broadly to other digital collections, making materials more easily discoverable and creating better large language models. As an outgrowth of these efforts, the project had planned to host interactive events for middle school and high school students to generate more interest in STEM.

Like the resilient women in the early days of domestic science, the project team relied on local, regional, and international networks to activate support for scientific progress. The University of Illinois Library marketing team released statements about the impact of grant terminations on the library, and the student newspaper published a piece about our project as well.⁴⁰ Expressions of support poured in from the project’s advisory board, which included US-based and international scholars.

With this support, the project team fought back through official channels. The University of Illinois filed an appeal within thirty calendar days of the termination, in accordance with NEH’s General Terms and Conditions for Awards to Organizations.⁴¹ The letter argued that the project contributed to American leadership in AI through its innovative approach to natural language processing as part of the digitization process, thereby aligning with President Trump’s agenda. University of Illinois’s campus legal team added “the termination is contrary to law” and that it “appears that the decision to terminate may have been based on a misunderstanding of the Award’s objectives, which support congressionally authorized research.”⁴² This appeal was met with resounding silence; the university never received confirmation that the request for review was received. The NEH sent generic instructions to all cancelled grants through eGMS about close-out documentation, and, under the direction of SPA, the project team filed the final report and financial materials by the June 18, 2025, deadline.

Of more immediate concern was the impact this would have on the project’s collaborators. This included two graduate students, one who was already working and expected to have a job through the summer, and another who was starting in May 2025. On such short notice, the project team was concerned that students would be stripped of income and professional development opportunities related to their own research interests. Equally troubling was the sudden withdrawal of support for Science Stories, a non-profit organization. Their opportunities for other sources of income had been limited by their commitment to this project. Finally, finding support for UMN was challenging, as internal funding streams might be limited to those affiliated with the University of Illinois.

The project team estimated the cost of funds needed to complete the work at $32,245 (USD). While the project team entertained the possibility of reaching out to the University of Illinois’s Advancement Office to gauge the possibility of crowdfunding the remainder of the project, funding came through other University of Illinois channels. One project leader used personal research funds to support the digitization graduate student. The Department of History stepped in to jointly fund the other graduate student position in partnership with Funk Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences (ACES) Library. This partnership productively expanded the scope of the text-mining work to include related agricultural materials digitized through previous initiatives, and present opportunities for expanding the history department’s range of digital humanities training materials. The lion’s share of the funding came from the University Library and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which were eager to support pre-tenure faculty. These onetime donations helped the team fulfill funding commitments to grant partners.

Still, long-term implications of the limited availability of federal funding remain. Because the IMLS, NEH, and NSF are key funding agencies for work with archival material related to science, the absence of opportunities will severely limit future research. This not only has implications for library science as a field, but for individuals as well. Two of the principal investigators and one of the team’s collaborators at UMN are pre-tenure faculty. NEH grants carry a level of prestige that shapes external reviews of dossiers. Without grant support, it is difficult for project collaborators to produce resulting publications, a key part of our tenure packets.

Beyond potential impact on job stability, the grant termination also required additional emotional labor for all the project’s participants.⁴³ As a field, librarianship has begun to grapple with the emotional dimensions of archival work, from encountering moments of racial violence in materials to navigating organizational policies.⁴⁴ In this case, the termination reactivated historic acts of marginalization and silencing. The women represented in the archival materials at the center of this project were often not recognized as scientists because the topics that they researched and taught were seen as solely domestic, and therefore not relevant to the scientific community. Terminating this project represented a triple threat to information science: it downplayed how these women contributed to scientific knowledge historically; it limited opportunities to advance information science and computer science as scientific fields; and it implied that any insights about AI would not be broadly useful due to the nature of the material.

The termination letter posed further emotional harm by stating that the project’s research threatened national stability, and so the federal government would undermine the stability of the livelihoods of all our project partners. Accusing the project of undermining the public good fundamentally misunderstands the goals of this project team to increase access to archival materials, lower barriers to computer science, and share broadly applicable research outcomes. The termination letter was designed to inflict emotional harm, enacting a chilling effect on free speech, scientific inquiry, and intellectual freedom. As Regehr et al. have shown, colleagues and supervisors play key roles in alleviating the burden of emotional labor in archival work.⁴⁵ The speed at which library administration, the campus legal team, and colleagues across the university provided financial and emotional support mitigated the emotional harm caused by the termination and enabled the project to move forward.

When this article was submitted for copyediting (August 29, 2025), the project team had not received any official acknowledgement that our termination appeal was received by the NEH, nor a final decision regarding our request for review. The team awaits the outcome of a lawsuit filed by Illinois Attorney General Raoul as part of a twenty-one-state coalition to challenge the legality of grant cancellations.⁴⁶ A ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals suggests that grants might be reinstated.⁴⁷

Conclusion

This research and unexpected loss of funding challenged and shaped the project team’s understanding of the archival materials, specifically the ways that networks of researchers shaped the advancement of science. While the project team does not adopt a presentist approach to history, the co-PIs were empowered by the fact that the women of the domestic science program navigated similar moments of programmatic disruption by relying on advocates in their social network. Digitized correspondence speaks to the ways that the domestic science community supported one another historically by answering questions and offering career advice. The grant termination ultimately brought this practice forward into archival practice. The project shifted from a metaphorical buy-in from our colleagues to a literal buy-in, and the documentation of these modern correspondence networks will be represented in the final project outcomes in the team’s institutional digital repository.

As the project navigates the ways that the archives represent women who were privileged enough to be documented, the project team also acknowledges how our own institutional privilege impacted grant outcomes. Because the project is based at a well-resourced, R1 institution in a “blue” state, the project team has had more resources and momentum to push back against the chilling effect that grant terminations represent. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has frequently condemned the Trump administration’s efforts to limit intellectual freedom while also continuing to invest in higher education. The team’s institution chose to support the project, and in doing so, supported our international network of collaborators.

The project team plans to use the momentum generated through conversations with collaborators to create shared resources and inspire ongoing digitization projects. With the internal funding, the project work will continue. Priorities for the next year include making the digitized collections available through the institutions’ digital libraries, creating a text mining version of the digitized collection, and developing a code cookbook with open-source code and processing techniques that require minimal equipment. Plans include Wikidata edit-a-thons with Science Stories to review machine-generated data and to remediate people, places, and institutions into linked open data. Through these efforts, “No Longer at the Margins” will continue to connect archival materials to broader constellations of data about women in science and the networks that supported and sustained them, empowering new generations of researchers, data scientists, and archivists working at the cutting edge of their fields.

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1. 1 . Eva Moseley, “Women in Archives: Documenting the History of Women in America,” The American Archivist 36, no. 2 (1973): 215–222, .

2. 2 . Andrea Hinding et al., eds. Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States (R. R. Bowker Co., 1979).

3. 3 . Kären Mason, “‘A Grand Manuscripts Search:’ The Women’s History Sources Survey at the University of Minnesota, 1975–1979,” in Perspectives on Women’s Archives, ed. Tanya Zanish-Belcher with Anke Voss (Society of American Archivists, 2013), 90.

4. 4 . Kären M. Mason and Tanya Zanish-Belcher, “Raising the Archival Consciousness: How Women’s Archives Challenge Traditional Approaches to Collecting and Use, or, What’s in a Name? Library Trends 56, No. 2 (2006): 345.

5. 5 . Suzanne Hildenbrand, ed. Women’s Collections: Libraries, Archives and Consciousness (The Haworth Press, 1986), 6–7; cited in Mason and Zanish-Belcher: 346.

6. 6 . Mary Frank Fox, “Gender, Hierarchy, and Science,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, ed. Janet Saltzman Chafetz (Springer, 2006), 444; quoted in Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière, Equity for Women in Science: Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Advancement (Harvard University Press, 2023), 4.

7. 7 . Elisa Miller, In the Name of the Home: Women, Domestic Science, and American Higher Education, 1865–1930, PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (2004); Anna Reser and Leila McNeill, Forces of Nature: The Women Who Changed Science (Frances Lincoln, 2021), 137.

8. 8 . A land-grant university is “an institution that has been designated by its state legislature or Congress to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, or the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act of 1994.” See “Land-Grant University FAQ,” Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities,” accessed, https://www.aplu.org/about-us/history-of-aplu/what-is-a-land-grant-university/. Amy Sue Bix, “Chemistry of Cooking, Chemistry in War: Women in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Land-Grant Science and Engineering,” Bulletin of the History of Chemistry 38, no. 2 (2013): 132–139.

9. 9 . The University of Illinois Archives uses “record series” as an intellectual and physical grouping for materials related by “creation, receipt, and use.” See https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/scheduling/basics.

10. 10 . The official title of the record series uses “letterbook” not “letter book,” a convention used by the University of Illinois Archives. See Record Series 8/11/2, https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=4594.

11. 11 . See Record Series 8/11/10 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=2966.

12. 12 . See Record Series 8/11/809 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=4519.

13. 13 . See Record Series 8/11/4 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=4596.

14. 14 . See Record Series 8/11/20 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=3955.

15. 15 . See Record Series 8/11/24 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=3962.

16. 16 . See Record Series 8/11/26 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=3959.

17. 17 . See Record Series 8/11/25 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=3958.

18. 18 . See Record Series 8/11/22 https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=3957.

19. 19 . Helen Elliot Davies and Wanda Sward Kreig, “School of Human Resources and Family Studies Home Economics Alumni Association History,” 1991, Home Economics Alumni Association History, 1991, Record Series 8/11/809, University of Illinois Archives.

20. 20 . See, for example, Adrienne Wadewitz, “Wikipedia’s Gender Gap and the Complicated Reality of Systemic Gender Bias,” HASTAC (2013), https://www.hastac .org/blogs/wadewitz/2013/07; and Elizabeth Losh and Jaqueline D. Wernimont, Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

21. 21 . Because the NEH’s review timeline is longer than nine months, digitization projects like these cannot fully account for maternity leaves in proposed project timelines like ours. The feminist framework for this project created room for ongoing conversation about malleable timelines to meet personal and professional goals.

22. 22 . Bethany G. Anderson and Kristen Allen Wilson, Democratizing Science for Women: A Digital Domestic Science Project, University of Illinois Campus Research Board grant, 2022–2023, $20,948.

23. 23 . Interviews for this project were covered by IRB nos. 24080 and 23715.

24. 24 . Bix, “Chemistry of Cooking.”

25. 25 . Home Economics Demonstration Railcar, 1917, Photographic Subject File, Record Series 39/2/20, Box 38, AGR 11-3. University of Illinois Archives https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=digitallibrary/digitalcontent&id=7881.

26. 26 . To learn more about these programs see the Household Science Extension Reports in Isabel Bevier’s Papers, Record Series 8/11/20, Box 1, University of Illinois Archives.

27. 27 . Science Stories is a linked data application that generates its own content from Wikidata and other machine-readable open data sources to tell the stories of women in science. “Welcome | Science Stories,” http://www.sciencestories.io. Preliminary Wikidata space for the project is available here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_No_Longer_at_the_Margins.

28. 28 . See https://www.chstm.org/.

29. 29 . See Rachel K. Staffa et al., . “A Feminist Ethos for Caring Knowledge Production in Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science,” Sustainability Science 17 (2022): 45–63, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-01064-0.

30. 30 . John Capasso, “Samuel Noble King (1834–1913) and Mary Reed King (1842–1928),” McLean County Museum of History, 2023, retrieved from https://mchistory.org/research/biographies/king-samuel-noble.

31. 31 . Stefan Baack, “A Critical Analysis of the Largest Source for Generative AI Training Data: Common Crawl,” in Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Association for Computing Machinery. 2199–2208, https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3659033.

32. 32 . NER tools first identify parts of speech, then use that information to extract proper nouns. For an expanded discussion of text mining tools, see Jessica Hagman and Mary Ton, “You are Here: Ou are Here: Mapping TDM Consults Across Disciplines and Infrastructures,” in W. Kramer, E. Muzzall and I. Burgos, eds., Text and Data Mining Literacy for Librarians (ACRL, 2025), 23–39, https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/136076.

33. 33 . Letterbook 1, Household Science Department Letterbooks, 1903–1913, Record Series 8/11/2, Box 1, University of Illinois Archives, pp 473–474.

34. 34 . EDITOR’S NOTE: Established as the United States Digital Service, the technology unit was so renamed by Executive Order 14158. Its parent department is the Executive Office of the President of the United States, Office of Management and Budget. It is frequently referred to as “doge.” See “Establishing and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’” Federal Register. 90 (14). Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration: 8441–8442. 29 January 2025.

35. 35 . Michael McDonald, letter to NEH Grantee, April 1, 2025.

36. 36 . All correspondence with project teams is supposed to be routed through this system so that copies of project documentation can be preserved as part of the public record. EDITOR’S NOTE: eGMS Reach is the official electronic grant management system used by several federal funding agencies.

37. 37 . National Endowment for the Humanities, An Update on NEH Funding Priorities and the Agency’s Recent Implementation of Trump Administration Executive Orders, April 24, 2025, https://www.neh.gov/news/update-neh-funding-priorities-and-agencys-recent-implementation-trump-administration-executive.

38. 38 . Karen Yourish et al., “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration,” The New York Times, March 7,2025, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html; Bruce Y. Lee. “These 197 Terms May Trigger Reviews of Your NIH, NSF Grant Proposals,” Forbes, March 15, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2025/03/15/these-197-terms-may-trigger-reviews-of-your-nih-nsf-grant-proposals/; A.J. Connelly, “Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List is Chilling Act of Censorship,” PEN America, May 28, 2025, https://pen.org/banned-words-list/.

39. 39 . Executive Order No. 14179, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” Federal Register, 90 (January 30, 2025), https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/31/2025-02172/removing-barriers-to-american-leadership-in-artificial-intelligence.

40. 40 . Heather Murphy, “Impact of NEH and IMLS Cancellations on the University of Illinois Library,” University Library News, April 11, 2025, https://www.library.illinois.edu/news/impact-of-neh-and-imls-cancellations-on-the-university-of-illinois-library/; Avery Paterson and Riley Shankman, “NEH, IMLS funding cuts drain UI Library,” The Daily Illini, May 10, 2025, https://dailyillini.com/news-stories/world-news/national-news/us-government/2025/05/10/library-funding-cuts/.

41. 41 . “General Terms and Conditions for Awards to Organizations (for grants and cooperative agreements issued between January 1, 2022, and September 30, 2024),” National Endowment for the Humanities, archived via the Wayback Machine on April 8, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250408123138/https://www.neh.gov/general-terms-and-conditions-awards-organizations-grants-and-cooperative-agreements-issued-january-2022. The letter was sent to the email provided by the termination letter, and a copy submitted through eGMS.

42. 42 . Paul Ellinger, Comptroller, University of Illinois, email to Michael McDonald, Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities, re: Appeal of Termination of Grant No. PW29685624, No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science, May 1, 2025.

43. 43 . Leah Blackwood, “Emotional Labour and Archival Work,” Emerging Library & Information Perspectives 6, no. 1 (2024): 49–51, https://doi.org/10.5206/elip.v6i1.16752.

44. 44 . Cheryl Regehr et al., “Emotional Responses in Archival Work,” Archival Science 23, no. 3 (2023): 554, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-023-09419-5.

45. 45 . Regehr et al., “Emotional Responses.”

46. 46 . “Attorney General Raoul Files Lawsuit Challenging Illegal Attempts to Terminate Critical Federal Funding,” Office of the Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, June 24, 2025, https://illinoisattorneygeneral.gov/news/story/attorney-general-raoul-files-lawsuit-challenging-illegal-attempts-to-terminate-critical-federal-funding

47. 47 . Thakur v. Trump, 3:25-CV-4737 (9th Circ. 2025).